Thursday's Child

Thursday's Child follows the lives of a mother and daughter who, despite their similarities, often find communication to be an extremely awkward endeavor. Tess is an aimless wanderer, trying on different jobs and cultures to see which fits but still feeling like an outsider whether she is living in Denmark--which enforces a regime of coziness and smells like hotdogs--or visiting her own eccentric family--Father, Richard, owns a stable of decrepit bulldozers and has an arsenal of guns no one has ever seen; Sister, Sylvie, is an eco-warrior with superpowers, while Mother, Della, is chronically worried, listens to NPR when her Republican friends are not around, and is the lone skeptic in her religious southern family.

When Della's beloved elder sister is dying and Tess leaves her husband in Denmark after he confesses to a night of passion with his hyper-achieving Danish boss, they find themselves in the grip of Della's peculiar close-mouthed southern family. Della is about to learn a secret that her sister never shared, while Tess is torn between starting over at home in America and going back home to Denmark and the man she has loved since high school.

Sometimes comic and occasionally tragic, Thursday's Child is about finding your home, the weirdness of families, the ups and downs of marriage, the joy of dog ownership, life in a foreign country, and feeling estranged from all of the above.